PLANK MAY 30, 2012
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If you read enough coverage like today’s Politico piece on how much conservative groups plan to spend in 2012, you quickly realize the Obama campaign faces a deep psychological problem in addition to a financial one. The Politico headline is that outside groups will spend $1 billion on top of the billion or so Mitt Romney and the RNC will have at their disposal. But the more interesting revelation is that conservatives are perfectly comfortable talking about the amount of money they’re deploying—they’re prone to overstating it if anything—while liberals are deeply uncomfortable talking about such sums and prone to understating them.
The reasons for this are both philosophical and practical. Conservatives think spending money to influence elections isn’t just legitimate but honorable. If you’ve made a lot of money yourself, it’s a reflection of your moral status. Spending part of your fortune to defend the economic system that helped you make it is therefore entirely just.
Conservatives also argue that the ability to attract big donors is a reflection of a candidate’s worth—after all, it means morally worthy people are investing in his or her cause. In general, when a candidate raises a lot of money, rich conservatives are more inclined to give that candidate money. That’s both because the candidate has become worthier in their eyes, and because the candidate with more money tends to win. Since it pays to have friends in power, donating to a candidate who’s already raised a lot of money is a solid investment.
Liberals, on the other hand, think spending large amounts of money to influence elections is dishonorable, since it’s fundamentally anti-democratic, at least in the sense that we think of democracy as one-man/one-vote. Moreover, wealthy liberals are far less likely to think of the money they’ve made as a reflection of moral status, and far more likely to emphasize the role of luck, circumstance, and social and economic infrastructure (public schools, government R&D, subsidized health care, etc.). That doesn’t mean they’re unwilling to translate their wealth into political power, but they’re certainly more sheepish about it.
When liberals see a candidate who’s raised lots of money from a small klatch of donors, they don’t see him or her as especially worthy, but as someone who’s figured out how to game the system. In general, when a candidate raises a lot of money, wealthy liberals are less inclined to give, at least in large amounts. They didn’t want to give so much in the first place, and it suddenly feels less urgent.
That, in a nutshell, is why you see operatives on the right crowing to Politico about the gobs of cash they’re stockpiling, while anytime someone so much as hints that Obama and the Democrats may raise $1 billion (which would be roughly half what Republicans are supposedly spending), David Axelrod, Jim Messina, and the rest of the Obama brass quickly dismiss the idea as preposterous.
Given what I’ve argued about liberals, they’re entirely right to do that. It reflects the reality that rich Republicans are simply much, much happier to pony up than their counterparts on the left—all the more so when a candidate is already raising ungodly sums—and that the current campaign finance system lets them do it pretty seamlessly.
P.S. Obviously I'm generalizing here--there are clearly exceptions on both sides of the aisle. But I think the analysis holds up pretty well because it's part of what makes someone a conservative or a liberal.
Follow me on twitter: @noamscheiber
8 comments
I've heard conservatives crowing about how much Obama is raising, as if it's evil and manipulates Obama's message and indicates he's a hypocrit. Meanwhile, I've heard conservatives downplaying how much they're actually raising, leaving out enormous sums from SuperPAC's. What they ARE hiding is that these huge sums are coming from comparatively few large Republican donors, while Obama's numbers are coming from a lot of donors giving not a whole lot. It's not the amount that matters quite so much -- though that does matter. It matters more who your policies benefit when you're done -- a few wealthy donors? Or a majority of the American people?
- AllanL5
May 30, 2012 at 6:53pm
If you don't care about natural beauty, you leave trash when you go camping. If you don't care about government, then doing something that diminishes its value doesn't hurt much. That's why Republicans can take a position that their number one priority is not governing, but undermining the current administration.
- Nusholtz
May 30, 2012 at 7:43pm
"Liberals, on the other hand, think spending large amounts of money to influence elections is dishonorable, since it’s fundamentally anti-democratic, at least in the sense that we think of democracy as one-man/one-vote." Scheiber must be auditioning for SNL.
- rayward
May 30, 2012 at 7:59pm
There oughta be a law. Everybody gets $X, and that is IT.
- Sophia
May 30, 2012 at 9:10pm
Nushoitz: It is more than just not caring. Government, civil government at least, is evil. Taxes are theft. The money is taken from the morally better people (rich or at least well-off) and given to less moral (poor). (A Conservative friend told me that she never got a dime from the government. She attended public schools, her state college and her state law school. Soon she will be using Medicare. But she never got a dime. Only the undeserving poor take government money.) Government also interferes with the free market. The free market is perfect. Money is stolen (taxes) to make perfection imperfect by making regulations that hinder business. Also, tax money is given to businesses that could not succeed in the free market. If a new business needs a start-up grant, then the free market is showing that it is a bad investment. Same thing for research grants for new drugs, etc. Grants, contracts, and tax loop holes do not count if they benefit successful business like Halliburton or Exxon. These things just return some of the stolen money. No wonder conservatives hate government.
- Vekert
May 30, 2012 at 10:47pm
That's not Conservative. That's "Rule By The Corporations", also known as Fascism. And it also ignores many inconvenient truths about the Free-Market. Things like Trusts, Monopolies, the tendency of any free-market to degrade into monopolies of a few very powerful corporations who then no longer feel the "invisible hand" of the free market. To maintain Capitalism, you need some entity in there to maintain the rules. That's what FDR discovered with the New Deal, after all.
- AllanL5
May 31, 2012 at 8:33am
mmmm..... here's an interesting story.... "Carl Cameron: Unions And Other Liberal Groups Will Spend $1 Billion" http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/05/31/carl_cameron_unions_and_other_liberal_groups_will_spend_1_billion.html I guess they didn't get the memo or read the story...
- srenshon
May 31, 2012 at 1:34pm
srensohn -- That's just Fox. If Romney threw a hand grenade into a McDonald's, Fox would run: "Obama: mass murderer and fast-food hating fanatic."
- Mikelawyr22
May 31, 2012 at 5:08pm